


without a spark.

by outpastthemoat



Series: new testament [just more of the same 'verse] [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Baseball, Fallen!Castiel, Fluff, Human!Castiel - Freeform, M/M, Playing catch, Post-Series, Schmoop, Singer Salvage, angsty fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-27 00:07:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean opens his eyes when he hears the first sharp sound of a rock ricocheting against metal.</p><p>He slips out of bed to to lean against the window, rubbing at the frosted glass glass with the cuff of his sleeve, and gradually the view comes into focus.  It’s Cas, of course, standing in the frozen mud of the salvage yard in a pair of unlaced boots, still wearing the navy blue bathrobe he hasn’t taken off since the accident, apparently impervious to the chill of this November morning.  </p><p>Cas picks up another rock from the small pile by his boots and hefts it contemplatively in his palm, eyeing a stack of scrap cars, and as Dean watches, Cas hurls it carefully at a junker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	without a spark.

_You sit around getting older_

_There's a joke here somewhere and it's on me_

_I'll shake this world off my shoulders_

_Come on, baby, the laugh's on me_

Dean opens his eyes when he hears the first sharp sound of a rock ricocheting against metal.

He slips out of bed to to lean against the window, rubbing at the frosted glass glass with the cuff of his sleeve, and gradually the view comes into focus.  It’s Cas, of course, standing in the frozen mud of the salvage yard in a pair of unlaced boots, still wearing the navy blue bathrobe he hasn’t taken off since the accident, apparently impervious to the chill of this November morning.  

Cas picks up another rock from the small pile by his boots and hefts it contemplatively in his palm, eyeing a stack of scrap cars, and as Dean watches, Cas hurls it carefully at a junker.  

All Dean has to do is slip on his boots; he never has gotten out of the habit of sleeping in his clothes and Novembers in South Dakota haven’t changed this at all.  He lets the back door slam behind him as he follows Cas out into the salvage yard.

Cas seems to have it out for the rusting remains of an ‘81 Nisson pickup. He sends another rock flying, and the windshield shatters with a startling loudness that sends birds flying out the tree, and fragments of glass litter the ground.

“Nice going, Cas,” Dean says, shaking his head.  “Were you aiming for that, or just trying for general destruction of property?”

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Cas says, looking anything but ashamed.  He looks more satisfied than anything as he rubs his shoulder.  The last set of x-rays had showed that his collarbone had finally healed, and so the sling had come off, and ever since then Cas seems to be doing his best to send that arm right back in its sling.  

“It’s early,” Dean says, more of an observation than an accusatation, but Cas jerks his head over to glance at him.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Cas says briefly.

Good, Dean thinks, not at all ashamed, because maybe that means Cas’ll stop locking the door to his bedroom every night, like he suspects he’d find Dean curled up on the floor by his bed if he didn’t take the necessary precautions.  Not that Dean would.

Dean picks up a rock from the pile by Cas’s boots.

“Ten bucks says I can get the wing mirror,” he says to Cas, who looks approving and also skeptical, and hurls the rock at the Nisson.  The side mirror shatters, and more glass litters the ground.

“I’m out of cash,” Cas says seriously.  “Will you accept a check?”

Dean glances at him.  That dark hair’s gone wild, sticking up here and there in clumps yet still managing to fall into his eyes.  When it grows out, Cas’s hair has something of a curl to it.

“Depends,” he says.  “Will it bounce?”

“Yes,” says Cas, with that almost smile Dean’s becoming all-too familiar with.  “I don’t have a checking account.”

Dean picks up another rock and throws it at nothing in particular, just out of sheer enjoyment of feeling the way his muscles work underneath his skin, and watches as Cas aims another rock at the Nisson, looking satisfied when it nails the exhaust pipe and bounces into the salvage yard.  

It’s nothing, really, just Cas trying out the range of motion he’s got in his shoulder, but Cas looks so pleased with himself that Dean almost can’t stand it, and it occurs to him that Cas just might be having  _fun_.

He can’t be sure, though. Oh, there are things Cas enjoys doing, he’s noticed, all of them necessary, like working on the Nova and having target practice down by the river on the edges of Bobby’s property. He gives off every sign of enjoying these things , but it’s not really _having fun_ , and that’s what gives Dean an idea.

He heads down to the basement that morning with nothing more than the vague idea that there might be something down here left over from the fire.

There’s a closet down here Dean hasn’t opened since he’s been back, and he’s fairly sure that this is where Sam’s been storing Bobby’s things. Not his books or papers or documents; most of the books Sam had managed to recover from the fire have been reshevled on the new bookcases Dean’d built for the library over the summer, and the extra copies had been claimed by Sam, dragged to Texas to line the walls of his basement office. And Bobby’s papers have been carefully stored in a safe box in the panic room.

But this is the resting place of Bobby’s  _things._ There’s a few flannel shirts hanging on the rack, and an old down jacket, and a cardboard box filled to the brim with trucker hats. There’s another box, filled with what must have been Karen’s things, old quilts and faded cotton dresses that smell like mothballs and yellowing, water-stained recipe books.

There’s an rifle, one Dean’s never seen before, and he supposes it must have once belonged to Bobby’s father. There’s a small box on the top of a shelf that Dean opens, with Bobby’s worn leather wallet, some old photographs Dean doesn’t look too carefully at, a pair of rings and a set of keys, and Dean sets that box aside carefully before continuing.

There’s a guitar, deep in the back of the closet, something Dean hasn’t seen since he was sixteen, the guitar he’d bought with money he’d made hustling pool and dragged around in the back of the Impala for months, until his father had told him to leave it behind at Bobby’s.

Dean picks the guitar up by its neck and pulls it out of the closet, inspecting it closely. It’s dusty, and it’s missing some strings, but he still remembers the feel of it, the way the songs he’d played had vibrated against his chest, and so he puts it aside. He’ll take it upstairs, when he’s done here, he thinks.

He must be getting closer to what he’d looking for, because it’s obvious that Sam nothing to do with some of these things; some of these boxes must’ve been kept in this closet for years.

And there it is, what he’s been looking for all along, a dusty box filled with memories, and Dean’s glad he brought a bottle of Jack Daniels downstairs with him because he needs a moment to wipe the dust out of his eyes and take a quick swallow of whiskey.

There’s a  _Star Trek_  t-shirt, once black and now faded to almost gray that Dean remembers wearing for weeks on end, one he must’ve left here at Bobby’s house long ago.

And somehow, just as Dean had suspected, there’s still a battered leather football -  _Sam’s_ football, the one he’d begged and begged for months before his eleventh birthday, the one he’d finally gotten when they’d been dropped off at Bobby’s house for two weeks that summer.

And there’s a pair of ancient mitts, still crusted with old dirt, leather cracking with age, and baseball covered with grass stains.These gloves and this ball, they're what Dean’s been looking for, and now that he’s found them all he really wants to do is box them back up, put them back away. But he doesn’t.

Dean takes the mitts and the ball, the guitar and the small box of Bobby’s things upstairs.

He oils the mitts carefully after lunch, tucked away in a corner of the garage, and when the late afternoon sun creeps across the oil-stained floor, he gets up and heads back to the house.

“Come on,” he says to Cas, washing dishes by the sink, and while Cas gives him a curious look, he follows Dean without a word to the back of Bobby’s property, where the junkers start to thin out and just before the flat land goes downhill to the river.

“Here,” Dean says, and tosses Cas a mitt.

Cas inspects it thoroughly, turning it over and over in his hands. “What’s this for?” he asks.

“We’re going to have fun,” Dean tells him, and he doesn’t really mind when Cas shoots him a dubious frown. It always takes Cas a while to warm up to new things; Dean figures that’s just Cas, so his reaction to the idea of  _ha_ _ving fun_ isn’t all that surprising, really.

Cas always gives him those judgmental frowns over new things, whether it’s Sam or humanity in general or the concept of breakfast for dinner, and look at him now: he treats Sam with a patient tolerance, likes humanity enough to fight to the death for it, and doesn’t say no to eating at Waffle House anymore.

And spurred by some almost-forgotten instinct, Dean hefts the ball in his hand, and throws it at Cas without warning.

The baseball bounces harmlessly off Cas’s chest; Dean hadn’t put enough weight into the toss for the impact to hurt. But Cas goes abruptly still, drops the mitt in his hand as if he’d been shot, looking down at his chest in startled surprise.

“That hit me,” he says slowly.

Dean throws his hands up in the air.  “You were supposed to catch it,” Dean says, and adds an eye roll for good measure.  “Fun, remember? It’s a game,” he adds, because he’s pretty sure Cas doesn’t know anything about playing games, unless they’re the kind where there’s alcohol involved.  

Cas gives him a carefully blank look, and Dean has to turn his head to hide a smile, because if there’s one thing he’s learned about Cas in eight months of living with him is that all that angelic innocence is something Cas definitely is putting on.  

But Dean indulges him anyway.  Cas does better when he knows the rules.  

“Yeah, a game,” he tells Cas.  “I’ll throw the ball at you, you catch it, then you throw it back to me.”

Cas looks considering.  “For how long?”

“”Til it stops being fun,” Dean says.

Cas gives him a harried look that Dean decides to ignore, because that’s another thing Cas puts on.  “Let’s go,” Dean says.  ”Put that glove on, Cas.”

He throws the ball to Cas, who catches it and frowns down judgmentally at the object in his hand but obligingly tosses it back, and heartened, Dean throws it to him again.

This time, Cas fumbles the catch, and the ball slips out of his grasp and rolls away to rest under one of the junkers.  “Go get it,’ Dean tells him, but Cas doesn’t move.

“This isn’t fun,” Cas says darkly.

“Give it a chance, Cas, all right?” Dean says in exasperation. “You just need practice, that’s all. Like learning to shoot,” he adds, because he remembers that, teaching Cas to shoot and load and take care of rifles and hand guns and sawed-off shotguns and how annoyed Cas had been at the whole procedure.

Cas sighs and turns away, heading after the ball. Dean calls after him, “Rolling your eyes  _isn’t_ good sportsmanship,  _Cas,”_ and he’s laughing to himself over that put-upon look on Cas’s face when Cas returns, handing him the ball.

“Let’s try that again,” he says, and lets the ball fly straight into Cas’s mitt.

They build up an easy rhythm, tossing the ball back and forth, and slowly the look of annoyance begins to fade from Cas’s face, replaced by something else, a strange look that could almost be wonderment.

And it’s  _good_ , just plain good to be outside even though the wind nips at the back of his neck and his fingers turn numb inside his mitt, because for once he doesn’t ache with emptiness, because for once he’s too filled up with laughter, busy showing Cas the way he’d once learned to spin around on his toes to let the ball fly out of his hand.

And it’s even good when Cas lets loose a pitch that Dean can’t catch, and it takes him by surprise, clocking him on the temple, it’s good because even as Dean lets himself hit the ground he’s still laughing because he’d caught of something that wasn’t  _almost_ a smile on Cas’s face, but rather, a full-on grin.

He sees stars, he sees Cas’s face, bending over him with concern.  “Dean?” he asks, and reaches out to touch Dean’s head.  His hands move gently over the knot on Dean’s head.  

Dean shakes his head, bats Cas’s hands away. “We need to work on your overhand pitch,” he says weakly. Dean fixes a determined smile on his face. He isn’t backing down now.  They’re having fun and they’re going to keep on having fun, even if it kills him.

“Fun, see?” he jokes. “Bet you’ve been wanting to do _that_  for a while.”

“Right,” says Cas dryly.  “Fun.”

But Cas was having fun, Dean’s sure of it, because somewhere behind the stars and the fringe of Cas’s lashes, so close to his face, he can see it again, Cas’s sudden, breathless smile that had cracked his face so suddenly, and his head’s going to be killing him later but that’s almost beside the point.

And it was worth it, just for the way Cas stands up and offers Dean his hand, helping him up off the ground, and for the way he gets to lean against Cas’s shoulder as he half-carries him back to the house.


End file.
